In a keynote speech at Computex2024, Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, talked about the new Snapdragon X chip having a lot of AI performance, from NPU to top of up to 45. But he also noted that while talking about "industry-leading performance," while everything is well and good, people should also be talking about how much power such chips are using.

"People want to talk about tops, but they also need to talk about watts.It is actually very important."If you're wondering what QUALCOMM's CEO is referring to, TOPS is the performance of the Npu-neural processing unit, which handles basic AI routines and allows the CPU and GPU to perform other tasks freely.

1 top is equivalent to 1 trillion operations per 1 second, which sounds like a huge number. Well, yes, but even compared to budget-level graphics cards, not so much. However, Npu is designed to perform AI tasks in the background, so it needs to meet performance requirements with as little energy as possible. And because all the electrical energy used in the chip is converted into heat, the power-efficient Npu helps keep the entire processor cooler.

Later, Amon compared Qualcomm's Snapdragon X NPU to AMD and Intel-made NPU, claiming 2.6 times better performance than Amd and 5.4 times better than Intel's Core Ultra7 chip. These are pretty bold claims, but they can't be verified because there's no independent review of the Snapdragon processor yet.

But even if the actual performance per watt of power consumption is only 50% of what Qualcomm claims, it is a considerable improvement on the competition.

And while it's not just heat, it's not just heat, even though Amon was pointing to a Snapdragon-powered laptop running a 20°C cooler with AI tasks than an equivalent laptop that uses a GPU. Getting more performance per unit of energy means you can get a handy boost to your laptop's battery life, allowing you to turn things down a notch to use even less power.

This was recently reported, and Dell's Snapdragon XPS13 laptop has 18 hours of battery life compared to the 27 hours of the Intel Meteor Lake version, and a 50% increase in constant video sto battery life is not something to eavesdrop on, and as with the performance per watt claim, it's not really long. Even if not, anything that makes the laptop run a little longer is welcome.

Personally, it was a step ahead of what Cristiano Amon was saying. It's a pretty pointless number because it's peak throughput under ideal circumstances, and it's already been confirmed that certain AI tools will work perfectly on processors other than the old npu. Power usage is much more important, and I think the processor market is likely to see proper competition in the CPU market, especially when it comes to having low power and high performance chips, if Qualcomm can really offer the Snapdragon X range for better heat, noise, and battery life, which the majority of pc users are willing to do.

of performance. . But I don't think the TOPs war is going anywhere yet.